


Four Dreams and a Nightmare

by DinosaurTheology



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Angst, Dreams, Dreams and Nightmares, F/M, Loss, Nightmares, Psychological Trauma, Witchcraft
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-05
Updated: 2017-09-05
Packaged: 2018-12-24 08:16:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,125
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12008715
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DinosaurTheology/pseuds/DinosaurTheology
Summary: Someone takes a peek at dreams all around Riverdale. Some are sweet, but a few nightmares creep here and there even in the nicest little towns.





	Four Dreams and a Nightmare

**Author's Note:**

> Another Riverdale offering and Riverdale...? If you do not give me this then I swear by my pretty floral bonnet I will end you. Sigh, I can't believe that reference is fifteen years old. I feel ancient. Forgive me for rambling, I fought fire for four hours yesterday and I'm pretty tired :D

Dreams are an interesting thing. I mean, really... you can lie to my face, right? You can just say any crazy thing and, if I don't catch you, I might just end up believing you. You might convince me that you can run the five miles from your house to downtown in only fifteen minutes, or maybe that you really don't think that this mini-skirt makes my butt look fat or that I really would look better with black hair. A good liar can convince someone of almost anything.

And that's not even the most insidious thing about lies. The greatest lies told by liars great and small are the ones that they tell to themselves. It's one thing to trick another person, even to do something as heinous as to make her believe that you love her when you'd really just like to get into her pants, but another all together to deceive yourself. Because a lie you tell another person will be found out in short order—almost always. She won't go on believing that you're cruel to her because you care. If you've convinced yourself that you love her, though? Shudder. You might go on living that lie for the rest of your life until your nothing but a shriveled up grasshopper.

So, yeah. Lies are easy to tell, easy to believe. That's why dreams are so interesting, to come back to our topic sentence, here. You can lie to someone all day and night, but only so long as you are awake. You cannot lie to a dream. They prance though the subconscious, untamed horses on the plains of sleep, champing and blowing flames of truth out of their nostrils. That's why if you really want to know something from someone don't ever, ever ask them, What do you think? Ask, instead, What do you dream?

All that's really great, her companion says, but it's gonna be morning before we get done if you don't stop all that philosophizing. Let's get a move on.

1.

Archie Andrews is an All-American boy from the top of his softly waving red hair to the bottoms of his two-tone Chuck Taylors. His face, broad and honest, seems made for the easy smile he seems to wear most frequently and not the brooding scowl that seems to grow with a will of its own when he plays guitar or struggles to write music. He's handsome, in a low-key way, and seems like the kind of boy that you'd take home to your parents. Artistic ambitions aside he seems, even, a trifle banal. His handsomeness could even be, if one felt particularly uncharitable, described as boring even though, one imagines, it would be anything but boring to be clasped in those well-muscled arms.

Yes... yes, indeed. Anything but boring, especially when you scratch a pica-meter below the surface and see the woman with honey colored hair and big, hazel eyes hidden behind thick, black-framed glasses. She gasps and squirms, limbs twined through his, offers prayers both silent and vocal to gods and goddesses of lust that have moved across the face of the waters since the earth was both formless and void. Musky, sweet music groans from strings and a bow while the cellist strains and beads of perspiration stand out tall on her forehead and collarbones, run down between her breasts to bathe a hard, flat belly. She'll share it with him when they lie heaving, skin to skin, and take her own tax from his blood and seed.

So, yeah... maybe not boring. There's a lot going on behind that gentle, placidly handsome face. Maybe if you're lucky, very lucky, he'll whisper those secrets into your innermost being

 

2.  
Archie's friend Forsythe Jones, better known (for reasons known only to God and teenagers) as Jughead, basks in dreams no less passionate although they are, indeed, not so erotic as those illuminating his best friend's nights. There's a girl, here, certainly but she's the kind, wide-eyed antithesis of everything you've seen writhing through Archie's subconscious. This young woman seems spun from cotton candy, all gentle smiles and warm embraces. If you did not know better you might even suspect that she wasn't real, just the figment of a lonely boy's imagination conjured up while he slept at a decrepit drive in theater or on a lonely park bench. She's far too solid to be totally an illusion, though, and most illusions do not have a name like Elizabeth Cooper attached to them.

And really, at the bottom of things, she features strongly in the powerfully wrought visions this young man dreams but is not at the center of them. She is a symptom, not the disease. He dreams of what the Wandering Jew, what any sojourner far from his own country, must: a home of his own. Lost, alone more than he has not been and all too often discarded, Jughead Jones dreams of a place where he can lay his head, let his eyes slip shut and not worry about what he might see when he opens them. It seems like he might have found this, or at least a simulacrum of it cradled against Elizabeth Cooper's breast. Sometimes a dream can be symbolic, after all, and maybe the blonde beauty with shimmering blue eyes is just a metaphor to describe something else entirely, something esoteric. 

And maybe, just maybe, a cat's not a furry little animal with claws and a tail. A dream can be many thing, sure, but it cannot be something that it's not. That would make it a lie, fundamentally, and if there's one thing we've already established it's that dreams aren't those at all.

3.

Veronica Lodge seems like she should be a nightmare alpha bitch. She isn't, thank God because there are enough of the damned things in the world without adding one that awfully clever, but does wear the confidence and and Prada necessary to convince even the most doubtful observer that she could be fundamentally awful. She was so back in a past life, in the bright lights and pulsing music of a New York night, if her dreams are anything to judge by. She twirls in them like a black flame dewed with perspiration that smells like the Red by Giorgio she dabs behind her ears and all across her collarbones. She reeks of sweet, seductive sin no man could resist in this guise but really, when you dig a little, it doesn't go very far below the surface.

Beneath the outer layer of mega-bitch and temptress an idealistic, thoughtful girl struggles to mend a world that is so often needlessly cruel. It has not broken her, not yet, but tears peek through the iron shell of resolve she presents to those who work to press her down This young woman will not, cannot let the forces of evil drive her or her friends towards and evil fate. She is no one's dummy, no one's victim thank you Chuck Clayton, and that's the truth if any dream ever told one.

Deeper still lies another truth, though. The girl here cannot stand straight but flops unjointed on her father's lap, instead, a limp ventriloquist's prop that's been taught to mouth the right words, loyal words for a man who doesn't deserve a single breath of them. Purple bruises smear the doll's delicate face; silver shimmers in deep, dark eyes. This dream is still the truth, sure, but some truths are ugly. Some truths hurt.

4.

Kevin's dreams are of the stage, or maybe his life's just a stage. He dreams of his father's warm embrace, how the older man did not reject him when he expected to be cast out (maybe literally) into the wilderness. He would like a handsome guy to share all this with, maybe just one to kiss occasionally right now (a little light petting would be nice, too). Moose, the football team's big, strapping offensive tackle, would be awesome. They seem to get along famously and, in the dreaming, draw close like a candle and its flame. 

Kevin's dreams taste sweet, almost cloying on the tongue, do not fail to please him on almost any life. He's a cheerful guy, at the bottom of things beneath all the usual teenage miseries, and it shows in the broad smile he wears both day and night. It's the personal pride flag of a young man who is happy to be who he is and understands how lucky he is, even in this day and age, to be as well loved for it as he is. Kevin is, all things considered, easily the most well-adjusted of his friends.

5.

Cheryl Blossom used to dream—she remembers it. They weren't super cool, profound dreams, or anything, just stuff about crushing her enemies, driving them before her, hearing their lamentations, et cetera. Y'know, normal teenage head bitch in charge stuff. She doesn't, anymore, because how can you dream if you are pretty sure that you never even sleep? She lies awake on tear streaked pillows certain that she'll never relax, never be comfortable in the darkness again. She never liked the dark, could only sleep because he kept it at bay. All of Cheryl's dreams were torn away and shredded with the other half of her soul.

6.

Elizabeth Cooper is the final dreamer—sort of . She's a vibrant, sweet soul and dreams of a happy family that never got to be happy, is certain she'll do better with her own in the future. Sometimes the man at her side is tall and has red hair but more often he is dark, slight and serious. In the dreams with a red-haired man the children are tow-headed, like her, but with the other they are always brunette like him. There are usually two but, in the happiest dreams, three. More never seem to occur. The boy looks like his father with Betty's big, blue eyes but the girls, for reasons difficult to fathom, look like tiny, delicate doll versions of Veronica Lodge. Dreams tell strange truths, sometimes, that are hard to interpret. Even Sigmund Freud didn't really have the key, even if he'd have sworn to it before the throne of God Almighty.

Betty's unconscious mind feasts on this cake most often but once in a while, if the day has been stormy or the night particularly dark, she slips into a closet at the back of her brain and emerges in a dark wig. Then the dream tells a frightening truth about knives and how they flense tender flesh wide open to reveal the red, raw muscle beneath or a spiked heel on a boy's head, pressing it beneath water just a hair too cool to boil the meat from his bones. Betty hates when she's told this terrifying truth and thrashes in bed to exorcise it through sheer violence done against her own limbs. When Jughead lies beside her he can hold her tight, until the storm passes, but when she is alone she lurches awake in a tangle of cool sheets and cold sweat. She hugs herself, then, and shudders. I must not do these things, she thinks to herself, I will not and cannot. The afterimages of cold steel buried in the warm, wet sinew of her friends do not subside easily, though. Perhaps, she thinks, some families never get to be happy because they don't deserve it; maybe mine is one of them.

*

The walker in dreams pulls out and wrinkles her nose. Jeez, I wish there was something I could do for that kid. She's... intense.

No kidding, her companion says. But it's almost morning. He yawns. You've got school and I need my beauty sleep.

I guess. I just wish there was something I could do.

In a week, maybe, when we've moved here. 

I kind of wish we didn't have to move. Why can't my dreams ever come true?

You know why we have to, he says. The... unpleasantness.

I guess, she says again, and blows a strand of blonde hair out of her eyes. I think I'm gonna like Riverdale, though, Salem. It seems like a fun place.

You would think so, Sabrina, he says. Only a teenager with raging hormones would be looking forward to living in that asylum.

Not a teenager, she says. A witch. I think we're genetically drawn to the macabre.

Don't I know it, he says. Now let's get back home before your aunts discover you're missing. You've got a long day of packing ahead of you and I've got a long day of sleeping ahead of me.

Okay, she says. Don't get your tail in a twist. C'mon Salem, let's head on home.


End file.
